a. Field of Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of social media. More particularly, the invention refers to enabling remote, private, and anonymous peer review in order to filter (partition) a set of photographs of a social media website user, with the intended use of later displaying one or more of such filtered photographs to favorably portray the user on a given social media website. The invention also relates generally to the field of computerized and internet-based methods and systems for enabling remote, private, and anonymous editing/enhancement of photographs of a user by another, with the intended use of displaying one or more of such edited/enhanced photographs to favorably portray the user on a given social media website. The invention also relates generally to the field of monetarily incentivizing participation of others to provide the peer review and/or editing for the social media website user.
b. Background of Invention
With the proliferation of the internet, a growing number of social media websites are emerging, the total of which are used by millions of users. In many cases, to gain access and use of the benefits and services of a given social media website, a user is either encouraged or required to publish photographs of themselves, onto these websites, in generally open forums, to be seen and viewed by large numbers of people. Exemplary categories of such social media sites include professional networking sites such as LinkedIn and Monster.com; dating websites such as Match.com and eHarmony; and social websites such as Facebook and Google+. Other examples include an individual user's website, or a corporate website, or any other internet site where photos are openly displayed. Users too often, naively post one or more photographs of themselves that are either not suitable for or are inappropriately selected for use with the particular social media site. Ideally, a user seeks to publish only those photographs of themselves which portray themselves favorably for the intended use of the given social media website.
A user may seek feedback on the suitability or appropriateness of each photograph in a set of photographs from personal acquaintances and family members. However, the user may not receive a candid response due to the reviewer's inclination to avoid providing negative feedback or insulting the user. In some instances, with proposed photos for a job-seeking social media site, for example, family members and/or personal acquaintances may not have a frame of reference or know the appropriate standards that a potential employer would have and, thus, are unable to provide the necessary feedback to the user to allow the user to determine which of the proposed photos, are best suited to publish on the job-seeking website. Therefore, this personal/family feedback is often inadequate. In the dating category, a user may be dissuaded from seeking feedback from an acquaintance or family member for various privacy reasons. Accordingly, there is a need to provide social website users with accurate, private, anonymous, and candid feedback, on each individual photo in a set of proposed photos, to assist the user in partitioning their photos into two groups (those best suited to upload to a social media site and those which should not be uploaded to a social media site).
Presently, there is no medium available that provides a social website user with a private ranking or critique of each of the user's proposed photographs based on the user's intended use (dating, job seeking, professional networking, social networking) before any of the photographs are publically uploaded.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,010,459 discloses systems and methods for users to rate members in a social network, as to the category (or type) of person the user feels a given member might fall into (as a person). In '459, one element of rating a member (as a person type), may include a review of the photos of the member (as a photo set), however, there is no provision for rating an individual photo of a member versus other photos of the same member and thus, there is no means to filter or partition the member's photos. Also, the '459 patent, and the references discussed therein are public in that the ratings take place after the photographs are all published to the intended website. None of the references discussed, disclose assisting a member, in private, in confidence, or otherwise, in selecting those photos which are best suited to upload to the social website (and which should not be uploaded to the social site). Moreover, the '459 patent are self-directed ratings, in that the ratings are only available to the user who made the ratings and not the member who uploaded the photographs. Thus, '459 fails to disclose a system or method for privately filtering and partitioning a set of photographs of a website user.
There is known in the art, www.hotornot.com, which is an online dating service that attempts to match members together. Each member uploads a picture of themselves along with unique information describing their personality. Then, through an open forum voting process, which includes votes from a community of members, in a number of personality areas, a unique numerical personality attractiveness rating is determined for each member. The service then facilitates each member's ability to search the database in order to find close personality matches to themselves. A close match is thought to be any two members who have the same, or similar personality attractiveness scores. This reference fails to disclose any system or method to, privately and confidentially, assist a user in selecting which photo or photos, of a given set of photos, are best suited for uploading to a given social media website.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,849,116 discloses systems and methods for allowing users to upload many types of images (people, landscapes, pets, objects, etc.) that are intended to represent or portray, through imagery, a given situation. In this system, there is no association between a user and an image. Such images are uploaded and made available to a community of users, in an open forum, whereby all members of the community of users are each able to vote on each image, as to how strongly they feel the attributes of a given image portrays or represents a given situation. Such votes are then tallied, for each situational category, and the image is then stored into a folder name which best describes the highest situation vote for that particular image. In so doing, such photos are easily later retrieved when a user seeks to locate an image which describes a certain situation of interest to the user. This reference fails to disclose any system or method to, privately and/or confidentially, assist a user in selecting which photo or photos (of themselves), of a given set of photos (of themselves), are best suited for uploading to a given social media website.